Paul's Web Space 2.1

DNC Convention 2008 Excitement

The DNC Convention has certainly been an interesting event, made even more so by the role I've played in exposing edweek.org's expanded coverage, and by my friend who spoke there.

First, I was Twittering about Edweek's coverage and Campaign K-12 blog using the #DNC08 and #RNC08 hashtags. Leslie Bradshaw sent me a Tweet in response describing the coverage that she was setting up for C-SPAN. Her social media agencies New Media Strategies and JESS3 created this site, picked the blogs, and made C-SPAN video embeddable by bloggers for the first time.

On the bottom of this page, there are local and national blogs, including ours; there is also a page compiling all #RNC08 and #DNC08 tweets, including many from Education Week. Not only are we using blogs and tweets more actively than ever before, but we managed to have our coverage picked up by C-SPAN and Frank Rich in the New York Times.


Then on opening night, my friend Margie Perez spoke at the convention. Margie was great — she talked about the impact of Katrina on her and on New Orleans, the lame response by the Bush Administration, and the help she got from Habitat for Humanity, and her smile was a mile across. She then introduced a video narrated by Jimmy Carter with more about the project. Her blog posts describing the experience are priceless (part 1) (part 2). Another friend, Armand Lione, posted the YouTube video you see above.

An electrifying week, and it's not over yet!

Labels: DNC08, edweek, politics, socialmedia, twitter

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140-Character Book Review Contest

I fortuitously followed a tweet from Cool Cat Teacher about a contest to write book reviews within the 140-character limitation imposed by Twitter. The deadline is this Wednesday, July 26, and there are prizes.

Here are my two entries, plus one for a movie that's technically not eligible (you could say my review is of the comic book, but it's really not):

1984 - Winston Smith tastes freedom and steamy sex. Big Brother comes crashing in. Status quo: perpetual war on terror; same war, new enemy.

Crime and Punishment - Raskolnikov plans and executes the "perfect crime." Guilt gnaws, he confesses, goes to jail, falls in love.

Iron Man - arrogant-jerk arms merchant Tony Stark: kidnapped by terrorists, turns peacenik, stomps baddies. He is Iron Man.

Labels: blog, contest, twitter

   Link: http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2008/07/contest---140-c.html

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We Media Miami

Two weeks ago I attended a pretty cool conference, We Media Miami, with Craig Stone, a colleague from work. There were plenty of interesting sessions, including preplanned large and small breakout sessions, and a closing unconference, but most importantly, there were also many good opportunities for networking. This meeting serves a relatively small group, maybe a couple hundred, but included senior executives from almost every major news media outlet in the US, as well as interesting thinkers in the fields of web technology, social media, social entrepreneurship, the future of media, and future in general.

At the final plenary session, they demonstrated a cool new technology (embedded below) which enables very interactive slide shows that appear like panoramas, courtesy of VUVOX - check their site for more examples. See this and more on the main We Media Miami page a smörgåsbord of event coverage via a dizzying array of social media windows and widgets, such as live on-site blogging and twitter hash tags I tweeted with.



The conference agenda included several panel sessions which were quite interesting, as well as an incomprehensible sidetrack into the area of medical informatics taking up a large chunk in the middle of day one. Highlights among the programmed presentations included: The Power to Change the World, and break-outs Search World, Nonprofit World and News World — I'm sure I missed as many good presentations as I caught.

Following the pre-set agenda was a self-organizing unconference, during which I attended two very interesting sessions - a presentation on the social cloud and OpenSocial by Google Developer Advocate Kevin Marks. The slides are great, but it's a big download; email me if you want the link. That was followed by NewsTrust salon, in which they first described the system (which is like a social bookmarking/tagging site with a serious news criticism component). We then spent several minutes dissecting and reviewing one article as a team on their site.

Finally, the networking opportunities were brilliant as usual, as I was able to connect with folks I was looking to meet, who were looking to meet me, or who just turned out to be cool people. The first night, Craig and I met Mark Blafkin from the Association for Competitive Technology, who travels in some of the same policy circles I do. Then as the conference progressed, I ran into David Cohn, whom I had known through NewAssignment.net; only later did I realize he also worked for NewsTrust. I later met Susan Mernit – recently of Yahoo! Personals, Blogher blogger, and connection via various social networks – who had pinged me on Facebook to meet. Finally, for lunch on the last day, I met Carlen Lea Lesser — who had connected with me via the conference social network. She was looking for insights and information about the education marketplace (arguably my domain, coming from Edweek), and could offer some expertise in social media metrics and ROI - my current obsession. A win-win.

Labels: facebook, media, socialmedia, twitter, wemedia08

   Link: http://www.ifocos.org/we-media-miami-2008

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